Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) people frequently experience violence directed toward their sexuality, gender identity, or gender expression. This violence may be enacted by the state, as in laws prescribing punishment for homosexual acts, or by individuals. It may be psychological or physical and motivated by biphobia, gayphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, and transphobia. Influencing factors may be cultural, religious, or political mores and biases.
Currently, homosexual acts are legal in almost all Western countries, and in many of these countries violence against LGBT people is classified as a hate crime. Outside the West, many countries are deemed potentially dangerous to their LGBT population due to both discriminatory legislation and threats of violence. These include countries where the dominant religion is Islam, most African countries (except South Africa), most Asian countries (except such LGBT-friendly countries as Israel, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines), and some former communist countries such as Russia, Poland (LGBT-free zone), Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such violence is often associated with religious condemnation of homosexuality or conservative social attitudes that portray homosexuality as an illness or a character flaw.
Historically, state-sanctioned persecution of homosexuals was mostly limited to male homosexuality, termed "sodomy". During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the penalty for sodomy was usually death. During the modern period (from the 19th century to the mid-20th century) in the Western world, the penalty was usually a fine or imprisonment. There was a drop in locations where homosexual acts remained illegal from 2009 when there were 80 countries worldwide (notably throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and in most of Africa, but also in some of the Caribbean and Oceania) with five carrying the death penalty to 2016 when 72 countries criminalized consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.
Brazil, a country with LGBT rights protections and legal same-sex marriage, is reported by (GGB) to have the world's highest LGBT murder rate, with more than 380 murders in 2017 alone, an increase of 30% compared to 2016.
In some countries, 85% of LGBT students experience homophobic and transphobic violence in school, and 45% of transgender students drop out of school.
State-sanctioned violence
Historic
The Middle East
An early law against sexual intercourse between men is recorded in Leviticus by the Hebrew people, prescribing the death penalty. A violent law regarding homosexual intercourse is prescribed in the Middle Assyrian Law Codes (1075 BCE), stating: "If a man lay with his neighbor, when they have prosecuted him (and) convicted him, they shall lie with him (and) turn him into a eunuch".
In the account given in Tacitus' Germania, the death penalty was reserved for two kinds of capital offenses: military treason or desertion was punished by hanging, and so was moral infamy (cowardice and homosexuality: ignavos et imbelles at corpore infames); Gordon translates corpore infames as "unnatural prostitutes"; Tacitus refers to male homosexuality, see David F. Greenberg, The construction of homosexuality, p. 242 f. Scholarship compares the later Germanic concept of Old Norse argr, Langobardic arga, which combines the meanings "effeminate, cowardly, homosexual", see Jaan Puhvel, 'Who were the Hittite hurkilas pesnes?' in: A. Etter (eds.), O-o-pe-ro-si (FS Risch), Walter de Gruyter, 1986, p. 154.
Europe
Laws and codes prohibiting homosexual practice were in force in Europe from the fourth to the twentieth centuries.
